Category: YAML

I spent, hay wasted, an hour of my time today trying to figure out the reason for the following error message from Puppet Hiera:

vmhost05-hbase3: Error: syntax error on line 30, col -1: `’ at /root/bigtop/bigtop-deploy/puppet/manifests/site.pp:17 on node ….The relevant part of the Hiera site.yaml file is

bigtop::bigtop_yumrepo_uri: “http://archive.hostname.com/redhat/6/x86_64/7.3.0/&#8221;bigtop::jdk_package_name: ‘jdk-1.7.0_55’Firstly, as a former compiler developer it hurts every bit of my brain when I see error message like above. Huge “compliment” to the Hiera developers – learn how to write code, dammit.

Secondly, after investigating this literally for an hour I figured out that the separator in uri: “http was a TAB (ASCII 9) instead of a whitespaces.

Seriously dudes – it’s 21st century. What’s the reason to use formats and parsers that fail so badly on separator terminals? Just imaging if Java or Groovy compiler would be so picky about tabs vs. spaces? I guarantee – the half of the development community would be screaming bloody murder right there. Yet – with frigging YAML POS it is just ok ;(